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Juan Baptista de Segura (1529–1571)

Juan Baptista de Segura was a priest and vice-provincial of the Jesuits in the
Spanish province of La Florida. In 1570 he led a mission to the Chesapeake Bay and was killed the
next year in an ambush led by Don
Luís de Velasco (formerly Paquiquineo), a Virginia Indian who had converted
to Christianity. Born in Toledo and educated at a time when Spanish clerics
vigorously debated the best way of converting American Indians, Segura joined the
Society of Jesus in 1556 and was ordained a priest the following year. Ten years
after that he was named vice-provincial of the Jesuits in La Florida. An intellectual
and idealist, Segura was also an indecisive leader who advised his superior that the
Jesuits should abandon La Florida and then, just a few months later, organized a
mission to the Chesapeake Bay. Segura insisted, against the advice of Florida
governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, that the Jesuits did not need military protection
on their mission. He instead placed his faith in Don Luís, who promised that the land
he called Ajacán would be rich in potential converts and natural resources. Segura
established his mission near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in September 1570, but
when Don Luís returned to his family, the Jesuits were without support. In February
1571 the Virginia Indian killed Segura and his fellow missionaries, leaving only an
altar boy alive. MORE...

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Early Years

Segura was born in 1529 in Toledo in the province of Castile, Spain. According to his
friend Juan de la Carrera, he was "a son of noble parents and good Christians of that
city." He studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at the University of Alcalá, receiving an
M.A. He then studied theology and the Bible for four more years, also at Alcalá.
During this time, the so-called Valladolid debate of 1550–1551 occurred, in which the
Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas argued that American Indians, as rational
creatures, should be converted to Christianity by persuasion alone. The theologian
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda responded that the natives could only be warred upon.
Scholars have suggested that, based on his later actions, Segura was more influenced
by Las Casas than Sepúlveda.

On April 19, 1556, Segura joined the Society of Jesus, a religious order founded in
1540 on the principles of education, military-like obedience, and worldwide
missionary work. According to the historian Frank Marotti Jr., Segura "seriously
cultivated the virtue of humility" and begged his superiors not to make him a priest.
They ordained him anyway in 1557, and, after brief service at missions in Spain,
Segura embarked on a career in academia. From 1560 until 1565, he acted as a rector
of schools in Villímar and Monterrey. In 1565, he served briefly as vice-rector of
the University of Salamanca before being transferred to the college in Valladolid
early in 1566. There, Segura, pegged by his subordinates as an indecisive leader,
became caught up in local scandals among competing Jesuits, all the while longing for
an assignment to Spanish America. In 1565 he wrote to Father Francis Borgia, an old
friend and soon to be the order's new father-general: "The Lord has always made me
confident that through this mission of the Indies, His overflowing goodness will give
me spiritual strength to begin to serve Him in earnest."

In January 1566, Segura wrote to Borgia again, requesting to be sent to the Spanish
province of La Florida, an area that stretched from the Delaware Bay in the north to
Mexico's Pánuco River in the south, and included much of the present-day American
Southeast, Texas, and parts of northern Mexico. His leadership style did not appear
to be serving him well in the political hothouse of Valladolid, and on September 28,
1567, Borgia named him vice-provincial, or leader, of the Jesuits in La Florida.
Segura sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, on April 10, 1568. Before he left,
his parents insisted he transfer his share of the family inheritance back to
them.

In La Florida

Segura arrived at Saint Augustine in present-day Florida on June 21, 1568. With him
were two Jesuit priests, three brothers, five catechists, and six American Indians
who had been baptized in Spain. Among the Jesuits were Father Antonio Sedeño and
Brother Juan de la Carrera, both of whom would figure into the Chesapeake mission. In
La Florida, Segura met Father Juan Rogel, who had just finished visiting Jesuit
missions in Guale, on the coast of present-day Georgia, and Santa Elena, near
present-day Parris Island, South Carolina. Spurred to action by Rogel's report,
Segura sailed to Havana and there began planning how to expand the Society's
presence.

The Jesuits had been in La Florida for only two years. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés,
governor of that province and, by 1568, of Cuba, too, had requested that they come,
and Father Borgia had agreed, in part because of rumors that a shortcut to China was
located somewhere on the coast. While the Spaniards were interested in the so-called
Northwest Passage for commercial reasons, the Jesuits saw it as an opportunity to
quickly and easily dispatch missionaries to the Far East. By 1569 Segura had traveled
some way up the La Florida coast and had become convinced it was too sparsely
populated and its natives too harassed by Spanish soldiers to be suitable for further
missionary work. In fact, in December he suggested to Borgia that La Florida be
abandoned entirely in favor of China. As late as May 1570 he told Borgia that Florida
was nothing more than "one long pile of sand" where the Indians "live like beasts and
are given to the most heinous sins among themselves." He concluded, "Florida is not
for the Society of Jesus." In a letter dated September 7, 1570, Borgia agreed with
his vice-provincial; however, by then Segura had sailed on a final mission.

Apparently, Segura held out hope for the Northwest Passage. In 1570 he began to
campaign Menéndez de Avilés to authorize a mission to the Chesapeake Bay. It is
unclear whether Menéndez de Avilés or Segura had ever traveled to the area, but the
Indian Don Luís de Velasco was known to be from there. He arrived in Havana from
Seville, Spain, sometime in the middle of the year and, according to Juan de la Carrera, told the Spaniards tales of the land's rich resources and large
population.

Menéndez de Avilés opposed the mission, and banned the Jesuits from traveling to
areas not already occupied by the Spanish military. This ran counter to Segura's
desire for a mission unmarred by military violence; in this way he demonstrated his
debt to the arguments of Bartolomé de las Casas. But he also wanted independence from
the governor's meddling, and the Chesapeake was far enough away from Havana to
provide it. When Segura responded with various religious and legal arguments,
Menéndez de Avilés remained unmoved. Tensions rose so that not only did the governor
call for Segura's removal from Florida, so did one of the vice-provincial's own
priests, Father Antonio Sedeño. Then Segura threatened to pull the Jesuits out of La
Florida altogether. Only at this point did the governor acquiesce.

Menéndez de Avilés still attempted to convince Segura that he should allow 100
soldiers to accompany the missionaries, but the priest refused. A Spanish chronicler
later described Menéndez de Avilés's reaction: "The Governor, if I recall correctly, or
another official of those provinces, used to say (it was a byword there) that these
good Fathers seemed to believe that the sole purpose for which His Holiness and His
Majesty and their superiors had sent them was to be martyred and cut to pieces by the
savages."

Mission to Ajacán

The missionaries sailed from Havana at the end of July and arrived in Santa Elena, on
the coast of present-day South Carolina, on August 5, 1570. In addition to Segura and
Sedeño, there were Fathers Juan Rogel and Luís de Quirós; Brothers Gabriel Gómez,
Sancho de Zaballos, and Pedro Mingot de Linares; and three lay catechists, Cristóbal
Redondo, Juan Baptista Méndez, and Gabriel de Solís. The only experienced men among
them were Fathers Rogel and Sedeño, and they joined Brother Juan de la Carrera, then
living on Santa Elena, in arguing that, without troops, they would certainly be
martyred. When Segura held firm, Rogel and Sedeño were allowed to stay behind. A
teenager then living at Santa Elena, Alonso de Olmos, joined the group as an altar
boy.

On September 10 they arrived in the land Don Luís called Ajacán. A letter from Segura and
Quirós to a Spanish official in Cuba, dated September 12, suggests that they were
well-received by the Indians despite the effects of a long and devastating drought. Their population had declined, Quirós wrote, but they assured the Spaniards
that "another sea" lay across the mountains, or five or six days' journey from their
current location. Segura urged the authorities to "send us with all speed a shipload
of grain."

Little is known about what happened next. Don Luís left the missionaries and
readopted his Indian identity and name,
Paquiquineo. Without his support, Segura and the missionaries struggled to
survive through the winter. The anthropologist Seth Mallios has argued that the
Jesuits unknowingly violated the Virginia Indians' gift-exchange economy, while another anthropologist,
Helen C. Rountree, has suggested that Paquiquineo's actions were motivated by the
shame of having been subject to the Spaniards' control. Whatever the case, in
February 1571, Paquiquineo and a group of Indian warriors attacked the Jesuit mission
and killed Segura and all of his men except for Olmos.

All predictions of martyrdom had come true. "Juan Baptista de Segura was totally out
of place in the wilds of America," the historian Frank Marotti has concluded, and
despite the steadfast support of Francis Borgia, his "shortcomings were a major cause
of the failure of the Florida Jesuit mission of 1566–1572."

Time Line

1529
- Juan Baptista de Segura is born in Toledo in the province of Castile, Spain.

April 19, 1556
- After attending the University of Alcalá and receiving an MA, Juan Baptista de Segura enters the Society of Jesus. He teaches in Medina el Campo and studies theology at a Dominican priory in Valladolid.

1557
- Juan Baptista de Segura, already a member of the Society of Jesus, is ordained a priest.

1560–1563
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura serves as rector at the university in Villímar, near Burgos, in the province of Castile, Spain.

1564–1565
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura serves as a rector of the college in Monterrey, in the region of Galicia, Spain.

1565
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura serves as a vice-rector of the college in Salamanca, in the province of Castile, Spain.

March 19, 1565
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura writes Father Francis Borgia: "The Lord has always made me confident that through this mission of the Indies, His overflowing goodness will give me spiritual strength to begin to serve Him in earnest."

Early 1566–June 1567
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura serves as a rector of the college in Valladolid, in the province of Castile, Spain.

January 29, 1566
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura writes to Father Francis Borgia, father-general of the Jesuits, requesting that he be sent on a mission to the Spanish province of La Florida.

September 28, 1567
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura is named vice-provincial of the Spanish province of La Florida.

March 13, 1568
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura departs Seville for Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain.

April 10, 1568
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura sails from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, for the Spanish province of La Florida.

June 21, 1568
- Father Juan Baptista de Segura arrives in the Spanish settlement at Saint Augustine in present-day Florida. With Father Juan Rogel he then travels to Havana, Cuba.

Mid-June 1569
- By this time, the Jesuits decide to abandon their efforts to convert the Indians of southern Florida. The vice-provincial, Father Juan Baptista de Segura, instead decides to focus on settlements at Guale and Santa Elena, on the coasts of present-day Georgia and South Carolina.

December 18, 1569
- In a letter to the Jesuit father-general, Francis Borgia, Father Juan Baptista de Segura suggests that the order abandon its efforts in the Spanish province of La Florida.

May 1570
- In a letter to the Jesuit father-general, Francis Borgia, Father Juan Baptista de Segura describes La Florida as "one long pile of sand" where the Indians "live like beasts and are given to the most heinous sins among themselves." He concludes: "Florida is not for the Society of Jesus."

Late July 1570
- A Jesuit mission led by Father Juan Baptista de Segura that includes the Virginia Indian Don Luís/Paquiquineo sails from Havana, Cuba, bound for the Chesapeake Bay.

August 5, 1570
- A Jesuit mission bound for the Chesapeake Bay led by Father Juan Baptista de Segura that includes the Virginia Indian Don Luís/Paquiquineo lands at the Spanish settlement of Santa Elena, near present-day Parris Island, South Carolina.

September 7, 1570
- In a letter to Father Juan Baptista de Segura, the Jesuit father-general Francis Borgia agrees that the Jesuits ought to abandon their efforts at converting natives in the Spanish province of La Florida. Segura, who has left on a mission, never receives the letter.

September 10, 1570
- A Jesuit mission led by Father Juan Baptista de Segura and including the Virginia Indian Don Luís/Paquiquineo lands near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

September 12, 1570
- In a letter written from their settlement somewhere near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Spanish Jesuit Fathers Luis de Quirós and Juan Baptista de Segura write to Juan de Hinistrosa about their mission to the Virginia Indians.

February 4, 1571
- The Virginia Indian Paquiquineo kills three Jesuit missionaries who have traveled to his village to meet with him. Paquiquineo and a group of warriors then travel to the mission site and kill the remaining missionaries save for the altar boy, Alonso de Olmos.